I’m using VirtualBoxHow to Use VirtualBox: User's GuideHow to Use VirtualBox: User's GuideWith VirtualBox you can easily install and test multiple operating systems. We'll show you how to set up Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux as a virtual machine.Read More to preview Office 2016. Microsoft strongly suggested uninstalling Office 2013, which isn’t currently viable due to work commitments. Using a virtual machine, however is a great way to explore different Office products alongside each other, without having to uninstall your current suite. I’ve also had a look at Office 2016 on Windows 10 Build 10130. Verdict: good times.

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s look at Office 2016.

New Overview

Much akin to the extended and inclusive testing phase of Windows 10, the Office 2016 preview has now accumulated over 1 million users, each providing valuable feedback, spread across both Windows and Mac operating systems. Office 2016 comes with many key updates, some software specific, some suite-universal.

Click-to-Run

Part of the Microsoft productivity ethos is streamlining operations. Office 2016 doesn’t come as a mammoth download, rather, it comes in a click-to-run format, streaming the installation directly to your system when needed. We have seen this before, but it looks like a good step forwards from Microsoft.

Of course, around the Autumn release there will be an offline installation package, but this is pretty handy if, like me, you no longer own a disc-drive and bandwidth is not a limitation.

The Tell Me box has echoes of fallen antihero Clippy (who will not be making a return), but only this time, it is actually really useful and unobtrusive.

One drawback to this system is the very thing that makes it great: its ease of use. I learned how to use Word and Office by clicking menus. If you use this system all the time, you’ll be fine, but you’ll never learn where the individual menus are nested. New Office users suddenly in front of an old version could struggle.

Smart Lookup

Smart Lookup, or Insights from Bing is one of the best new features arriving with Office 2016. It is a relatively advanced search tool plugged directly into the Bing search engine. After highlighting a single word, or sentence, or even paragraph, you can then Press L, or right-click and select Smart Lookup. You’re then treated to the Insights sidebar which, depending on your selection and the software you’re using, will return very useful information.

For example, a single word selection in Word will bring back a range of definitions, synonyms, and antonyms. In Excel, it defines numerics. Honestly, in the latter, Smart Lookup could use a little more exploration, perhaps allowing Smart Lookup to define the standard formulas included with Excel, and explaining some of the mathematical formulas to boot. This will, like the Tell Me bar, become a very useful tool.

New Themes and Backgrounds

This is a simple one. Microsoft has introduced some very nice new backgrounds, and we can alter our theme into a range of colors. Quite why you’d want to is beyond me, but the option is there nonetheless. I’ve gone with the rather natty Black theme with Circles and Stripes, because YOLO, and you can see the before and after shot below.

Office Updates

Office can now update itself, whether you like it or not. As Microsoft shifts the update emphasisPros & Cons of Forced Updates in Windows 10Pros & Cons of Forced Updates in Windows 10Updates will change in Windows 10. Right now you can pick and choose. Windows 10, however, will force updates onto you. It has advantages, like improved security, but it can also go wrong. What's more...Read More from end-users back toward a centrally dictated timeline, Office 2016 receives a portion of the same treatment. There will be options to control the regularity of these updates closer to the release date, but at the moment Microsoft hasn’t given us too much information about these processes other than Update Now, or Disable Updates.

Security

Microsoft has tighten up Office 2016 security protocols. This means more control over sensitive data, and more flexibility with those that can view and edit your files.

Data Loss Protection: DLP will be available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and will let administrators centrally manage data policies for content authoring and document sharing. We will also see policy tips and advice when those policy-lines are being crossed.

Other than the introduction of the Tell Me bar, not much has changed for Word. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad thing. Word 2013 is great and I use it successfully everyday, but perhaps we will see some other tweaks closer toward the fall.

Inbuilt Business Intelligence: Microsoft hasn’t quite brought it all under one roof, but there are more export options to PowerBI. Power Query, an Office 2013 add-in, has made it into Office 2016 as standard. Power Query used a built-in JSON parser, which has also made its way into Excel to help build visualizations.

New Charts: Microsoft has moved a number of add-in charts to the standard build, including TreeMap, Sunburst, Waterfall, Histogram, and Pareto. Expect to see more charts appear as add-ins following the fall release.

Office 2016: PowerPoint

PowerPoint, like Excel, remains largely aesthetically untouched, with the addition of the Tell Me bar the only significant change.

The biggest innovation in PowerPoint is the continued integration of Office Mix to help authors curate content, and for end users to find that content easier. Office Mix groups content types together, organizing them as PowerPoint slides, and lets them skip directly to the bits they want. Mixes can be shared using Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

While this is pointed more toward PowerPoint online, there will be a gradual crossover of services.

I actually found the aforementioned Tell Me tool an excellent resource in PowerPoint. It isn’t my strongest Office tool, and having the option to ask for what I wanted was a welcome addition to the screen, and I can see this tool being extremely well used.

Attach File now delivers a drop-down menu illustrating your 12 most recently attached items. This list displays from both off- and online sources, including Dropbox, Google Drive, and of course, SharePoint and OneDrive. If the attachment is stored online, you can now choose from one of three options;

Insert Edit Link: Recipient can edit this document

Insert View Link: Recipient can only view this document

Attach Copy: Everyone receives a copy of the file

When Office 2016 actually arrives in the fall, I’d like to see this tool functionality expanded slightly by offering senders the chance to upload their document on the fly, to OneDrive, and to send a link to that file.

Outlook now resizes well, too, in a small nod to the tablet market, as you can see in the image below (Office 2013 on the right). In Office 2013, reducing the Outlook window size slowly crumples your folder list until they are unreadable. Outlook 2016 automatically collapses the list, hiding them until needed with a very handy back button. In a similar nod to devices with smaller storage, local mail storage can now be switched between 1, 3, 7, or 14 days, whilst Outlook 2013 defaults to one month.

Something Microsoft Exchange account administrators will be interested in is that Exchange accounts must now be created using the Auto-Account setup; there will no longer be support for manually created accounts using direct server names. This means unless your organization supports and publishes autodiscover information, you’ll be out in the cold.

Email management tool, Clutter, will also be coming to Outlook 2016. Clutter is already available to O365 users, utilizing the Office Graph to help manage your inbox more efficiently. Clutter simulates the email aspect of your world, the regularity you interact with individuals, their location, and swiftly files away the more irritating mail that isn’t quite spam. Clutter isn’t spam removal. It is a machine learning tool designed to understand mail priority and offer you a personalized service. I’m looking forward to this one!

Finally, something to always look forward to are the updated Top-Level Domain junk mail lists, saving you and I a morsel of time each day.

Winners and Losers

The biggest Office 2016 winner is clearly Outlook. The attachment management, the introduction of Clutter, changes to local mail storage, and improved resizing lead me to believe this will be another year or more onboard the Outlook train.

Overall though, Office 2016 is nice. Not sublime, just really nice. There is an aesthetic consistency throughout the suite, as well as a continuation from Office 2013 which many users will appreciate. The visual changes–other than the introduction of the Tell Me bar–are relatively minimal.

Viewing some parts of Office 2016 on a QHD screen could expose more of the growing pains of this "from the ground, up" redesign. On my new laptop, for example, I find I can no longer even view all the dialogs pertaining to Advanced Search, in Outlook. There's no vertical scroll bar displayed and the entire bottom of the multi-tab dialog is simply below the bottom border of the dialog. Is this a result of the notorious Windows scaling problem plaguing some users of laptops using QHD screen? I'm not sure. All I know is the effect is some functionality is now actually crippled, since it can no longer be displayed in Office 2016.

“2016-04-19: Outlook 2016 Vertical Scroll-Bar Not Present in Contacts Window Only. On a brand new Windows 10 laptop, in Office 365 Outlook 2016, the vertical scroll-bar is not present in the Contacts window only (it IS present on all other windows in Outlook and other Office applications). This problem makes editing Contacts very difficult/impossible. I have already tried checking/unchecking 'Disable vertical scroll-bar' in other Office applications (Word/Excel). That had the desired effect in those applications, but had absolutely no effect on the Outlook Contacts window. I have seen similar questions in other posts starting years ago with Office 2013, but those questions were never answered for the specific case I am raising here. Is it possible that this is a bug which has been around for several years and which has never been addressed or solved?”

This simple bug means that Outlook 2016 is unusable for me. From other posts, similar problems may exist in Outlook 2013. My only solution is to revert to Outlook 2010.

Is Microsoft taking a list of feature requests for inclusion in the next release?
I would like the ability in PowerPoint to select all elements (including shapes and tables) on all slides in a presentation and change the language from (say) US English to Australian English.
Also the ability to do this for slide notes.

Always been a pain, probably always will be. I've went to the length of googling and googling and finally managed to get some vba together which I used for an add-in, then one click of a button and every single shape in the presentation was changed. You can look at that at http://pastebin.com/y3pdBba3